a long way gone

I love to read, loved it since I was a little girl. Other kids would want to watch tv or a movie, I'd want to read. Other teenagers got in trouble staying up late at night talking to their friends on the phone; I got in trouble for reading until 3am when I had school the next day.

But at this moment in time, I'm finding it very hard to read. A few friends recommended a book to me, one they used with their youth. So several days ago I picked the book up and began to read. I've only gotten to page 50. This is very unusual for me (I read the whole last Harry Potter book in something like 7 hours). But this book... this book is making it very difficult for me to read.

The book is "a long way gone: memories of a boy soldier" by Ishmael Beah, a young man my age who grow up in Sierra Leone. When he was just 13, he was conscripted into the rebel army and forced to do horrible, horrible things. As an older teenager, he was rescued and brought to the United States where he lives and works now.

His writing is beautiful, and haunting, and very, very painful. I'm reading along and I feel physical pain in my stomach. What this young man has experienced, has had to see, had to do... it shouldn't even be humanly possible. After each chapter, and sometimes after just a passage, I have to put the book down and pray. Pray for the people in this world who remember, who survived. Pray for the people in this world who are living through such atrocities right now. Pray for the people in this world who are inflicting such violence on their sisters and brothers.

I'm have a really hard time reading. But I keep trying. I need to get through this book - can't put my head under the covers or pick up a happier novel. Even if I really, really want to.

sadness

"We just really knew him as the question mark kid."

This quote describing the relationship between Monday's gunman and his peers has troubled me in particular.

I was driving from Staunton to Atlanta when this was happening--drove by the Blacksburg exit with police cars whizzing by, not realizing what was going on--and have only today gotten to really inform myself on what happened yesterday at VT.

I ache. I think that's probably the best way to describe what I'm feeling at the moment. Ache for those who were killed, those injured physically, those injured emotionally, their families, the community, God. I ache that our Creator would watch as one of those made in the divine image would so distort that image. I ache that this young man somehow was known best as the "question mark kid," that he wouldn't or didn't know how to let people in, that people didn't know or wouldn't try to "get in."

I ache. I ache to be Christ's servant to the best of my ability, to minister to all those I meet so that should a question mark kid come across my path, I will been open to the Spirit so that God could use me to offer love. I'm in Atlanta in part to work on our own youth ministry, to strengthen what our community offers our kids. And I think, did this question mark kid have people like our kids do? Wonderful, warm, caring adults and families that will not let them slip through the cracks, not let them go unknown? Do we, with our warm and caring families, do even we have a kid who is a question mark, one we do not know, don't know how to know?

I ache and I pray. It's all I know to do.